The Art of Political Murder

Winner of the T. R. Fyvel Book Award 2008 (Index on Censorship Awards) Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2009 On a Sunday night in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death. Two days earlier, a Church-sponsored report had implicated Guatemala's government in the disappearances of 200,000 civilians. The Church, feeling that it could not rely on the legal system, took the controversial decision to assemble a team of men, Los Intocables (The Untouchables), to take down Gerardi's killers. In a gripping reconstruction, worthy of Graham Greene, Francisco Goldman traces Los Intocables struggle with the Guatemalan authorities to reveal the true story, uncovering the involvement of youth gangs, political corruption and organised crime. Most of all, he tells the story of an extraordinary group of courageous people and their fight for justice.

Francisco Goldman's first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens,won the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. Both novels were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Goldman's novel The Divine Husband was published by Atlantic Books in 2006. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, New York Times Magazine, and New York Review of Books. The Art of Political Murder (Atlantic 2008) is his latest book.